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Bona-fide Spyware

WhatsApp has more than 400 million users only in India. I am one of them and I cannot evade it due to very strong network effects. In several cases, I pushed a friend or an acquaintance to use a messaging tool other than WhatsApp. And I was the only user for that person who eventually uninstalled that messaging tool before long.

We know WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption but collects metadata which matters as, once again, stated here.WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption to protect your communications. At the same time, though, it regularly collects some seemingly less important details attached to your messaging activities—metadata. This information includes IP addresses, phone numbers, who you have spoken with, and when, among others. It may not look so important, but even such small digital traces can act as identifiers. For instance, it was exactly a piece of metadata—a Proton Mail recovery email—that led to the arrest of a Catalan activist.As for WhatsApp's Privacy Policy, the app records a wealth of usage logs including "the time, frequency, and duration of your activities and interactions." Other identifiable data such as your network details, the browser you use, ISP, and other identifiers linked to other Meta products (like Instagram and Facebook) associated with the same device or account are also collected.It is amazing that this aspect does not perturb us in India. The other day, I was initially surprised to see that the admins of one my WhatsApp group got very worried when a few members shared some metadata (names and contact details) with a high profile educational technology company of India. The admins decided to dissolve the existing WhatsApp group and create another similar group by collecting additional personal data from us. Fortunately this data is part of end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp message and, hence, it may be outside the purview of Meta. What caught my attention was that most of us were sharing this additional personal data is the existing group and thus enabling us to share even more precise data with the educational technology companies.

It does not seem to matter even when we know that Meta knows so much about us. There are even more serious concerns.The issue is that surveillance techniques are getting always more sophisticated. WhatsApp’s internal security team identified many instances of so-called correlation attacks where a smarter analysis of encrypted data—linked to its very much visible metadata counterpart—can evade the app's privacy protections.With respect to WhatsApp, Facebook and other Meta products we are nonchalant in India. The following quote from this post reflects my thoughts.What's really is scary that we're at a point were we made #SPYWARE socially acceptable simply because the authors are from "well-respected organizations" rather than "evil hacker groups".#Privacy #WhatsApp #Spyware #MastodonIndians #MastIndia #India

cc: @mastodonindians@a.gup.pe